Subtitles and Transcript

Heather Brooke

0:11
Once upon a time, the world was a big, dysfunctional family.It was run by the great and powerful parents,and the people were helplessand hopeless naughty children.If any of the more rowdier children questionedthe authority of the parents, they were scolded.If they went exploring into the parents' rooms,or even into the secret filing cabinets, they were punished,and told that for their own goodthey must never go in there again.

0:44
Then one day, a man came to townwith boxes and boxes of secret documentsstolen from the parents' rooms."Look what they've been hiding from you," he said.The children looked and were amazed.There were maps and minutes from meetingswhere the parents were slagging each other off.They behaved just like the children.And they made mistakes, too, just like the children.The only difference was, their mistakeswere in the secret filing cabinets.Well, there was a girl in the town, and she didn't thinkthey should be in the secret filing cabinets,or if they were, there ought to be a lawto allow the children access.And so she set about to make it so.

1:30
Well, I'm the girl in that story, and the secret documentsthat I was interested in were located in this building,the British Parliament, and the data that I wantedto get my hands on were the expense receiptsof members of Parliament.I thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy. (Applause)It wasn't like I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker,or anything like that, but the amount of resistance I gotfrom this Freedom of Information request,you would have thought I'd asked something like this.

2:05
So I fought for about five years doing this,and it was one of many hundreds of requests that I made,not -- I didn't -- Hey, look, I didn't set out, honestly,to revolutionize the British Parliament.That was not my intention. I was just making these requestsas part of research for my first book.But it ended up in this very long, protracted legal battleand there I was after five years fighting against Parliamentin front of three of Britain's most eminent High Court judgeswaiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data.And I've got to tell you, I wasn't that hopeful,because I'd seen the establishment. I thought,it always sticks together. I am out of luck.

2:47
Well, guess what? I won. Hooray. (Applause)

2:52
Well, that's not exactly the story, because the problem wasthat Parliament delayed and delayed releasing that data,and then they tried to retrospectively change the lawso that it would no longer apply to them.The transparency law they'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else,they tried to keep it so it didn't apply to them.What they hadn't counted on was digitization,because that meant that all those paper receiptshad been scanned in electronically, and it was very easyfor somebody to just copy that entire database,put it on a disk, and then just saunter outside of Parliament,which they did, and then they shopped that diskto the highest bidder, which was the Daily Telegraph,and then, you all remember, there was weeks and weeksof revelations, everything from porn moviesand bath plugs and new kitchensand mortgages that had never been paid off.The end result was six ministers resigned,the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign,a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency,120 MPs stepped down at that election,and so far, four MPs and two lordshave done jail time for fraud.So, thank you. (Applause)

4:15
Well, I tell you that story because it wasn't unique to Britain.It was an example of a culture clash that's happeningall over the world between bewigged and bestockingedofficials who think that they can rule over uswithout very much prying from the public,and then suddenly confronted with a publicwho is no longer content with that arrangement,and not only not content with it, now, more often,armed with official data itself.

4:45
So we are moving to this democratization of information,and I've been in this field for quite a while.Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid,I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like,see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down.I think that was a pretty good indicationabout my future career as an investigative journalist,and what I've seen from being in this access to information field for so longis that it used to be quite a niche interest,and it's gone mainstream. Everybody, increasingly, around the world,wants to know about what people in power are doing.They want a say in decisions that are made in their nameand with their money. It's this democratization of informationthat I think is an information enlightenment,and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment.It's about searching for the truth,not because somebody says it's true, "because I say so."No, it's about trying to find the truth based onwhat you can see and what can be tested.That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions aboutthe right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people,or that women should be subordinate to men,or that the Church was the official word of God.

5:55
Obviously the Church weren't very happy about this,and they tried to suppress it,but what they hadn't counted on was technology,and then they had the printing press, which suddenlyenabled these ideas to spread cheaply, far and fast,and people would come together in coffee houses,discuss the ideas, plot revolution.

6:14
In our day, we have digitization. That strips all the physical mass out of information,so now it's almost zero cost to copy and share information.Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.We're moving to what I would think of as a fully connected system,and we have global decisions to make in this system,decisions about climate, about finance systems,about resources. And think about it --if we want to make an important decision about buying a house,we don't just go off. I mean, I don't know about you,but I want to see a lot of houses before I put that much money into it.And if we're thinking about a finance system,we need a lot of information to take in. It's just not possiblefor one person to take in the amount, the volumeof information, and analyze it to make good decisions.

7:04
So that's why we're seeing increasingly this demandfor access to information.That's why we're starting to see more disclosure lawscome out, so for example, on the environment,there's the Aarhus Convention,which is a European directive that gives peoplea very strong right to know, so if your water companyis dumping water into your river, sewage waterinto your river, you have a right to know about it.In the finance industry, you now have more of a rightto know about what's going on, so we havedifferent anti-bribery laws, money regulations,increased corporate disclosure, so you can now track assets across borders.And it's getting harder to hide assets, tax avoidance,pay inequality. So that's great. We're starting to find outmore and more about these systems.

7:51
And they're all moving to this central system,this fully connected system,all of them except one. Can you guess which one?It's the system which underpins all these other systems.It's the system by which we organize and exercise power,and there I'm talking about politics, because in politics,we're back to this system, this top-down hierarchy.And how is it possible that the volume of informationcan be processed that needs to in this system?Well, it just can't. That's it.And I think this is largely what's behind the crisisof legitimacy in our different governments right now.

8:29
So I've told you a bit about what I didto try and drag Parliament, kicking and screaming,into the 21st century, and I'm just going to give youa couple of examples of what a few other people I knoware doing.

8:40
So this is a guy called Seb Bacon. He's a computerprogrammer, and he built a site called Alaveteli,and what it is, it's a Freedom of Information platform.It's open-source, with documentation, and it allows youto make a Freedom of Information request,to ask your public body a question, soit takes all the hassle out of it, and I can tell youthat there is a lot of hassle making these requests,so it takes all of that hassle out, and you just type in your question,for example, how many police officers have a criminal record?It zooms it off to the appropriate person, it tells youwhen the time limit is coming to an end, it keeps track of allthe correspondence, it posts it up there,and it becomes an archive of public knowledge.So that's open-source and it can be used in any countrywhere there is some kind of Freedom of Information law.So there's a list there of the different countries that have it,and then there's a few more coming on board.So if any of you out there like the sound of thatand have a law like that in your country,I know that Seb would love to hear from youabout collaborating and getting that into your country.

9:50
This is Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She's an Icelandic MP.And quite an unusual MP. In Iceland, she wasone of the protesters who was outside of Parliamentwhen the country's economy collapsed,and then she was elected on a reform mandate,and she's now spearheading this project.It's the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative,and they've just got funding to make it an internationalmodern media project, and this is taking all of the best lawsaround the world about freedom of expression,protection of whistleblowers, protection from libel,source protection, and trying to make Iceland a publishing haven.It's a place where your data can be free, so when we thinkabout, increasingly, how governments want to access user data,what they're trying to do in Iceland is make this safe havenwhere it can happen.

10:41
In my own field of investigative journalism, we're alsohaving to start thinking globally, so this is a site calledInvestigative Dashboard. And if you're trying to tracka dictator's assets, for example, Hosni Mubarak,you know, he's just funneling out cash from his countrywhen he knows he's in trouble, and what you want to doto investigate that is, you need to have access toall of the world's, as many as you can,companies' house registrations databases.So this is a website that tries to agglomerate all of thosedatabases into one place so you can start searching for,you know, his relatives, his friends, the head of his security services.You can try and find out how he's moving out assetsfrom that country.

11:23
But again, when it comes to the decisions which areimpacting us the most, perhaps, the most importantdecisions that are being made about war and so forth,again we can't just make a Freedom of Information request.It's really difficult. So we're still having to rely onillegitimate ways of getting information, through leaks.So when the Guardian did this investigation aboutthe Afghan War, you know, they can't walk intothe Department of Defense and ask for all the information.You know, they're just not going to get it.So this came from leaks of tens of thousands of dispatchesthat were written by American soldiersabout the Afghan War, and leaked,and then they're able to do this investigation.

12:07
Another rather large investigation is around world diplomacy.Again, this is all based around leaks,251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, and I was involvedin this investigation because I got this leakthrough a leak from a disgruntled WikiLeakerand ended up going to work at the Guardian.So I can tell you firsthand what it was like to have accessto this leak. It was amazing. I mean, it was amazing.It reminded me of that scene in "The Wizard of Oz."Do you know the one I mean? Where the little dog Totoruns across to where the wizard [is], and he pulls back,the dog's pulling back the curtain, and --"Don't look behind the screen. Don't look at the man behind the screen."It was just like that, because what you started to seeis that all of these grand statesmen, these very pompouspoliticians, they were just like us.They all bitched about each other. I mean, quite gossipy,those cables. Okay, but I thought it was a very importantpoint for all of us to grasp, these are human beingsjust like us. They don't have special powers.They're not magic. They are not our parents.Beyond that, what I found most fascinatingwas the level of endemic corruption that I sawacross all different countries, and particularly centeredaround the heart of power, around public officialswho were embezzling the public's moneyfor their own personal enrichment, and allowed to do thatbecause of official secrecy.

13:34
So I've mentioned WikiLeaks, because surely what could bemore open than publishing all the material?Because that is what Julian Assange did.He wasn't content with the way the newspapers published itto be safe and legal. He threw it all out there.That did end up with vulnerable people in Afghanistanbeing exposed. It also meant that the Belarussian dictatorwas given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaignersin that country who had spoken to the U.S. government.Is that radical openness? I say it's not, because for me,what it means, it doesn't mean abdicating power,responsibility, accountability, it's actually being a partnerwith power. It's about sharing responsibility,sharing accountability. Also, the fact thathe threatened to sue me because I got a leak of his leaks,I thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistencyin ideology, to be honest, as well. (Laughs)

14:32
The other thing is that power is incredibly seductive,and you must have two real qualities, I think,when you come to the table, when you're dealingwith power, talking about power,because of its seductive capacity.You've got to have skepticism and humility.Skepticism, because you must always be challenging.I want to see why do you -- you just say so? That's not good enough.I want to see the evidence behind why that's so.And humility because we are all human. We all make mistakes.And if you don't have skepticism and humility,then it's a really short journey to go from reformerto autocrat, and I think you only have to read "Animal Farm"to get that message about how power corrupts people.

15:17
So what is the solution? It is, I believe, to embodywithin the rule of law rights to information.At the moment our rights are incredibly weak.In a lot of countries, we have Official Secrets Acts,including in Britain here. We have an Official Secrets Actwith no public interest test. So that means it's a crime,people are punished, quite severely in a lot of cases,for publishing or giving away official information.Now wouldn't it be amazing, and really, this is what I wantall of you to think about, if we had an Official Disclosure Actwhere officials were punished if they were foundto have suppressed or hidden informationthat was in the public interest?So that -- yes. Yes! My power pose. (Applause) (Laughs)I would like us to work towards that.

16:10
So it's not all bad news. I mean, there definitely isprogress on the line, but I think what we find is thatthe closer that we get right into the heart of power,the more opaque, closed it becomes.So it was only just the other week that I heard London'sMetropolitan Police Commissioner talking about whythe police need access to all of our communications,spying on us without any judicial oversight,and he said it was a matter of life and death.He actually said that, it was a matter of life and death.There was no evidence. He presented no evidence of that.It was just, "Because I say so.You have to trust me. Take it on faith."Well, I'm sorry, people, but we are backto the pre-Enlightenment Church,and we need to fight against that.

17:04
So he was talking about the law in Britain which isthe Communications Data Bill, an absolutely outrageous piece of legislation.In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance.You have the National Security Agency buildingthe world's giantest spy center. It's just this colossal --it's five times bigger than the U.S. Capitol,in which they're going to intercept and analyzecommunications, traffic and personal datato try and figure out who's the troublemaker in society.

17:36
Well, to go back to our original story, the parentshave panicked. They've locked all the doors.They've kidded out the house with CCTV cameras.They're watching all of us. They've dug a basement,and they've built a spy center to try and run algorithmsand figure out which ones of us are troublesome,and if any of us complain about that, we're arrested for terrorism.Well, is that a fairy tale or a living nightmare?Some fairy tales have happy endings. Some don't.I think we've all read the Grimms' fairy tales, which are,indeed, very grim.But the world isn't a fairy tale, and it could be more brutalthan we want to acknowledge.Equally, it could be better than we've been led to believe,but either way, we have to start seeing it exactly as it is,with all of its problems, because it's only by seeing itwith all of its problems that we'll be able to fix themand live in a world in which we can all behappily ever after. (Laughs) Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)